Ten years, ten freaking years of existence in this cyber world! Who knew that back in 2004 when I first began this blog that I will actually stick with it for 10 years. I never in my wildest dreams thought I would accomplish what I have done with this blog. To tell you the truth the moment I started it I felt that it will be like my other failed attempts at keeping a diary where I would give up 5 pages in. I am now 10 years into this blog. I have lost my way a couple of times, went into hibernation mode (still am in a way but I am slowly shedding that agoraphobia I have acquired in the past years with my blog) but in the end I am staying true to myself.

This blog has always been and will always be a personal space where I unleash my thoughts, ramblings, rants, obsessions and more. My obsessions at the moment revolve around technology, gadgets, and television shows. I shy away from a lot of the “journalistic” reporting of events and such and try to be unique. I feel if I am not unique then why even bother writing that one piece I wish to share with the world.

Earlier this evening (or rather yesterday) my friend Swera called me up and mentioned how my site was down. I’ve been running a bunch of technical updates yesterday and for some reason I broke something while I was updating and removing malicious files, etcetra, etcetra :P Lo and behold I found out that I broke a file in my theme and hence had to reinstall everything from scratch.

Now hopefully things are back up and running and should be smooth sailing from here on out but I won’t stop with the updating, I might take the site down in the next few weeks and do some much needed maintenance and facelift in celebration of my blog turning 10 years old!

10 freaking years of blogging! How cool is that! Anyways I just wanted to update you on the situation and things should be fine now. Should is the operative word!

Holy Shitzu! WordPress has just released the latest version of its blogging platform, version 3.8 and it has become a RADICAL change! Everything is different, it’s more modern, has a cleaner look, you can customize a bit more stuff and most importantly it should function much better than before.

I haven’t been more shocked or surprised by a change like this than well when version 3.0 came out I believe. I am liking it so far. Also next year’s “IT” theme should be “Twenty-Fourteen”. I guess this means I should get to cracking on your theme ZDistrict, right? :P

If you haven’t updated be sure to backup your files and then press the update button, nothing bad should happen but in case it should it’s better to be prepared.

For the past couple of weeks, if not months I’ve been having blog errors where the Site goes temporarily unavailable, it appears that I have been using too much of my Shared Hosting RAM and thus I had to switch over to a VPS [Virtual Private Server] (I’ve been using it since last night) and so far things are flowing much smoother. I feel the website loading faster and everything functioning well).

I will be performing maintenance on the website in the upcoming weeks so as to make everything load faster and work 100% better, thus don’t worry if things stop functioning for a bit, I am still around and will be around for a while :P

It’s officially my blog’s ninth birthday! What a journey this has been! Happy Birthday Bloggie Woogie! “Cause mami I’ve done been around the world, seen a lot of places… been around your girl believe I read faces…” Woops scratch that, I’ve been listening to some r&b music [P Diddy feat. Ginuwine – I Need a Girl (Pt.2)] but seriously I am very proud of my achievements.

This past year of blogging has seen some improvements, Jacqui has become a doll that roams around abandoned warehouses, again scratch that I meant visits events and attends gatherings not to mention gaining a slight more readership when it comes to this humble abode. Life is simple, life is sweet, and I’m really enjoying this journey. I don’t want to take a lot of your time but here are some links to my past celebrations, and I’m hoping that I’ll be around to welcome in the big TEN!

To all my closest and dearest friends and family THANK YOU! To all my new friends I’m proud to have met and gotten to know you! And to all you other strangers, “Hello!” :)

To better understand my craziness and wackiness be sure to read through “The Eight Faces of Jacqui” a post I wrote last year describing my growth as I went along.

In a few days (4 to be exact) I will be celebrating my ninth year blogging anniversary. I cannot actually believe it’s been nine years since I started blogging, next year will be the big TEN and I should have something special planned for then. Right now I have a few ideas but I’m swamped with many things floating in my head and so I get distracted too often.

How has it been all those years? I’ve loved the early years where I used to talk about my university life and how classes were sometimes boring (sorry some Professors) coping with university life and helping out my parents with my sisters took a toll on me but I was the most active then. I especially loved the days where I wrote about my USA trips, I would commit to a full month of log-writing which is awesome.

Shortly after in 2006 (2 years after I started blogging) I graduated and by the end of the year started working at a bank which was basically my darkest years. I still read some posts from way back when and see how miserable I was. That basically was the beginning of the next chapter in life. I am still in that chapter although jobless at this moment I would guess that the next chapter would be marriage (if that’s written in the stars for me, if not oh well).

I was insanely active the first 4 years or so but later on life caught up and my activity decreased, I still try to commit but it’s too hard sometimes. I do my best right now and blog as soon as I’m able to but I have noticed I stopped sharing every aspect of life (its a good thing sometimes) I remember being able to check my blog to figure out where I went that day to compare whether it was me who got that speeding ticket or not hehe.

In short, I don’t know what I should do for this year’s celebration. Any ideas?

A while back I felt that my header has gotten too long for my blog it took up most of the screen as it was almost 500 pixels in height and therefore I enslaved my younger sister #4 (a.k.a. N) to come up with a new concept. I tried to make my own but she thought it was too cluttered and worked her magic on it.

The vision is cleaner this time with a retina display ready image, it looks that much sharper and better. It might take a bit longer to load but that’s the price I have to pay I guess. Sister #4 wasn’t the only one who contributed to this header the main contribution and the re-vision of it was a product of my father’s artistic eyes. He gave us the pointers to shift something to the left or to the right and change things around.

Now that everything has a cleaner place what do you think of this upgrade?

I personally find it a vast improvement than the previous one with more focus on the couch, because in reality that’s where all my laziness takes place. I procrastinate life on that couch and well I think anyone who visits procrastinates there too.

So, thanks Daddy and Sister #4 for all your help it was very useful and yes I may be a beast when it comes to picking things left and right but in the end the result is brilliant!